The winner of the Chilean Competition in last year’s Valdivia Film Festival, ‘Raíz’ (2013) managed not only to get chosen to participate in many festivals from Latin America and beyond, but also snagged a Chilean distribution deal, something that doesn’t happen too often with award winning films from Chile.

But thanks to new deals made between the government, the distributors, and the big cinema theaters, we now have a steady and strong feed of Chilean movies on the biggest and also the smaller cinema chains in the whole country, and thus, with those numbers, maybe Chilean filmmakers may aim for bigger and wider audiences.

Nevertheless, when one tries to scan the landscape of Chilean films from recent years, many times you’ll find that there are many kind of movies, but there’s a certain type of films that are getting made more and more frequently, and that is the ones where the southern scenery of Chile is the protagonist.

Thus, the cinematography, the framing and how green or blue the scenery gets, the more beautiful and astonishing everything becomes. In ‘Raíz’ (2013), it’s not only that, as it also takes part of what one could conceive as the theme of the film, about roots and origins, and how we were all species started in nature, and how big trees must have big roots.

It becomes a landscape film, where every bit of action is edited within a bunch of nature shots that are gorgeous and for sure help to sustain and remind you of how it’s a movie about looking for the origins, but in the end it becomes way too obvious.

Written and directed by Matías Rojas Valencia, the story follows Amalia, a 26 year old woman who comes back to her family house when her lifetime nanny dies, and her nine year old son is left alone without a father. Without her mother’s consent, Amalia leaves her house with the family car, and with the nanny’s son, to go on a road trip to find the long-lost father.

The film follows the tropes and guidelines of most road movies, but without any humor put into it, just following the stops, having strange characters appear on the way, and finally stopping for a moment to wonder about Amalia’s father as well. It’s a movie about what’s under us, the earth in which we stand, about the place in which we grew up, and failed opportunities.

It’s a movie about origins. The structure of the film allows for a deeper journey, as the trip continues and it feels as if they’re getting more and more into the inside of the countryside, how it seems there’s always something under and beyond the places that they just visited, that the strange only will become stranger. It’s a trip to the literal roots of the issue they are presenting, and to the roots of the problem of absent parenting in Chile and Latin America.

I’d recommend this movie to those who haven’t been able to watch a good Chilean film in a while, as this surely ticks most of the boxes when it comes to a good movie from this southern part of the world, it also serves as some kind of show-and-tell regarding the riches and visual landscapes you can see here. But, for anyone else, here you won’t find profound themes, but shallow symbols and beautiful pictures, and that isn’t enough. For me, at least.

Amicus Productions: Horror-Scifi

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965)
The Skull (1965)
Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965)
The Psychopath (1966)
Dalek's Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966)
The Terrornauts (1967)
The Deadly Bees (1967)
They Came from Beyond Space (1967)
Torture Garden (1967)
The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970)
The House That Dripped Blood (1971)
I, Monster (1971)
Tales from the Crypt (1972)
What Became of Jack and Jill? (1972)Asylum (1972)
The Vault of Horror (1973)-- And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)
From Beyond the Grave (1974)
Madhouse (1974)
The Beast Must Die (1974)
The Land That Time Forgot (1975)
At the Earth's Core (1976)
The People That Time Forgot (1977)
The Monster Club (1981)

Hammer Pictures: Horror-Fantasy-Sci Fi

The Mystery of the Marie Celeste (1935)
Man in Black (1949)
Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949)
Dick Barton at Bay (1950)
Four Sided Triangle (1953)
Spaceways (1953)
The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
X: The Unknown (1956)The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Quatermass 2 (1957)
The Abominable Snowman (1957)
Tales of Frankenstein (1958)Dracula (1958)The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)
The Mummy (1959)
The Stranglers of Bombay (1960)The Brides of Dracula (1960)
The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)
The Terror of the Tongs (1961)
Taste of Fear (1961)
The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
Shadow of the Cat (1961)
Captain Clegg (1962)
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Paranoiac (1963)
The Damned (1963)
Maniac (1963)
The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)
The Old Dark House (1963)
Nightmare (1964)
The Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
The Gorgon (1964)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)
Fanatic (1965)
She (1965)
The Nanny (1965)
The Plague of the Zombies (1966)Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
The Reptile (1966)
Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966)
The Witches (1966)
One Million Years B.C. (1966)
Slave Girls (1967)
The Mummy's Shroud (1967)
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
Quatermass and the Pit (1967)
Journey to Midnight (1968)
Journey into Darkness (1968)
The Vengeance of She (1968)
The Lost Continent (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
"Journey to the Unknown" (1968)Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969)
Moon Zero Two (1969)Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
Crescendo (1970)
The Vampire Lovers (1970)
When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
The Horror of Frankenstein (1970)Scars of Dracula (1970)
Lust for a Vampire (1971)
Countess Dracula (1971)
Creatures the World Forgot (1971)
Twins of Evil (1971)
Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971)
Hands of the Ripper (1971)
Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde (1971)
Vampire Circus (1972)Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)
Straight on Till Morning (1972)
Fear in the Night (1972)
Demons of the Mind (1972)The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
Captain Kronos - Vampire Hunter (1974)
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
To the Devil a Daughter (1976)
"Hammer House of Horror" (1980)
"Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense" (1984)
Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror (1984)
Beyond the Rave (2008)
Let Me In (2010)The Resident (2011)